Brandeis-Bardin Wernher von Braun

These first rocket stands erected at the SSFL were built at the Bowl Test Facility, or “Bowl,” as reported in the 2009 EnviroReporter.com article Bowled Over. “Thanks to the Nazi designs brought to the U.S. after the war by SS officer and rocketeer Wernher von Braun, these three stands built in 1949 played a crucial role in America’s burgeoning rocket program.”

A chance encounter with a former Rocketdyne employee at a February 5, 2014 SSFL Work Group meeting revealed more about the lab’s Nazi rockets origins. Taking a vape break during the meeting, a former worker of 30 years named Don told this reporter that von Braun’s original rocket test stand was not built from scratch using the plans of Hitler favorite, von Braun. “They took it apart in Europe and shipped it over unassembled,” he said. “It came in mahogany boxes with Nazi swastikas emblazoned on them.”

“Von Braun’s V-2 rockets slaughtered 7,250 military and civilian personnel in World War II, mostly in London and Antwerp, Belgium,” reported EnviroReporter.com in the 2014 piece High Stakes for Hot Property. “Production of his lethal rockets cost 20,000 Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp inmates their lives with 9,000 dying from exhaustion alone. About 350 of these Nazi slaves were hanged, including 200 for sabotage, with the remainder shot or dying from disease and starvation.”

One French resistance fighter enslaved at von Braun’s rocket works was Guy Morand. In 1995 he testified that he was nearly executed by von Braun in 1944 after a supposed sabotage attempt. “Without even listening to my explanations, [von Braun] ordered the Meister to have me given 25 strokes…Then, judging that the strokes weren’t sufficiently hard, he ordered I be flogged more vigorously…von Braun made me translate that I deserved much more, that in fact I deserved to be hanged…I would say his cruelty, of which I was personally a victim, are, I would say, an eloquent testimony to his Nazi fanaticism.”